American author (1954- )
The usual things helped: some distance, prayer, chocolate.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very--it's like being a shoemaker. You know, shoemakers stick to your last and you stay there working over your last, and it's pretty drudgy in a lot of ways.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, Big Think, Apr. 6, 2010
I ate a few chocolates and felt more animated. Then I crashed and was just as sad as I'd been before, but fatter and tired.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
A man dies and goes to heaven. He is being shown around by an angel. Everything is just so sweet and gentle, the total golden tender presence of God everywhere, a pond over there, a beautiful field there, and some hills for people who like to hike, and this expansiveness in every direction of sky and light and physical beauty. And there is this section separated from the rest; it has beautiful high walls. The man who's just come to heaven says, "What's over there?" The angel says, "That's for the fundamentalists. They don't consider it heaven if anyone else got in."
ANNE LAMOTT
"Jesusy Anne Lamott", Christianity Today, Jan. 1, 2003
It's almost like learning to meditate to learn to hear what your kid is actually saying.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, beliefnet
This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
I don't know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, BookBrowse
It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird